The Way of a Gardener: A Life's Journey

By Des Kennedy

Accomplished novelist, satirist, and garden writer Des Kennedy describes his life journey from a childhood of strict Irish Catholicism in England to a charmed existence amid the gardens of his Gulf Island home in British Columbia. From his First Holy Communion to his days as a young seminarian, through the Beat poetry scene in New York and the social upheavals of the 1960s, this monk-turned-pilgrim pursues a quest for meaning and purpose. After leaving monastic life and moving west, Kennedy takes up a new vocation in what has been called the Church of the Earth. On a rural acreage, he and his partner build their home from recycled and hand-hewn materials and create gardens that provide food as well as a symbiosis with the Earth that is as profoundly spiritual as past religious rituals. Spiced with irreverence and an eye for the absurd, The Way of a Gardener ranges over environmental activism, aboriginal rights, writing for a living, amateur wood butchery, the protocols of small community living, and the devilish obscenity of a billy goat at stud.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781553656234

Des Kennedy

Des Kennedy is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, author and environmental activist. He is the author of four books of essays including a memoir, The Passionate Gardener (Greystone Books, 2006), and three novels including Climbing Patrick's Mountain (Brindle & Glass, 2009). Noted as one of the most influential personalities on the Canadian gardening scene, Kennedy writes a regular column for BCLiving magazine and has been a columnist for the Globe and Mail. He lives on Denman Island, BC.

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The Way of a Gardener

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A LIFE’S JOURNEY

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Des Kennedy

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Copyright © 2010 by Des Kennedy

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from

The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).

For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca

or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books

An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

www.greystonebooks.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kennedy, Des

The way of a gardener : a life’s journey / Des Kennedy.

ISBN 978-1-55365-417-9

1. Kennedy, Des. 2. Gardeners—British Columbia—Denman Island (Island)—

Biography. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography.

4. Environmentalists—Canada—Biography.

5. Sustainable living. I. Title.

SB63.K45A3 2010 635.092 C2009-906846-X

Editing by Susan Folkins

Cover and text design by Heather Pringle

Cover photograph by Allan Mandell

Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

Printed on acid-free, FSC-certified paper that is forest friendly

(100% post-consumer recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free

Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support

of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council,

the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit,

and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing

Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

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ALSO BY DES KENNEDY

FICTION

The Garden Club

Flame of Separation

Climbing Patrick’s Mountain

NON-FICTION

Living Things We Love to Hate

Crazy about Gardening

An Ecology of Enchantment

The Passionate Gardener

For my brothers, Ger, Brendan, and Vincent

And most especially for Sandy

CONTENTS

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preface

one SANCTUARY

two THE NEW WORLD

three WHAT DRAGONS DEVOUR

four DIVINITY AND POETRY

five THE TAKING OF VOWS

six EXILE

seven THE WEST

eight REVELATIONS

nine HOMESTEADING

ten HOUSE BUILDING

eleven THE FATE OF THE EARTH

twelve DREAM GARDENS

thirteen WORDS

fourteen GROWING YOUR OWN

fifteen SILENCE AND SOUNDS

sixteen DWELLING PLACE OF THE GODS

seventeen REDEMPTION

acknowledgments

PREFACE

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And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

I would not change it.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

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IAWAKEN TO A RESTLESS, MOVING darkness. A high wind is soughing through big conifer trees all around me. The roar is like that of ocean combers heard from a distance or the rumble of a slow-moving freight train. It is a wind from the southeast rummaging through the tree canopy. Slender culms of black bamboo rattle fretfully against the screening of the little summerhouse where my partner and I are lying. We sleep out here for as much of the year as weather allows, exposed to the movements and sounds of the night. Earlier I was awakened by the extravagant hooting of barred owls calling to one another through the woods. Raucous, haunting, antiphonal cries, back and forth, they’re as cryptic by night as the calls of ravens are by day. The oracular chorus completed, the soundscape is reclaimed by the rising wind and I drift back into uneasy sleep.

Later in the night there comes a sudden banging on the wooden steps leading up to our little sleeping chamber. Startled awake, I have an instant sense of attack, of danger. But then I make out, not ten feet away, the form of a deer, a small doe, frozen in fear. She must have struggled up the steps and now stands on the deck, unsure of her next move. The deer and I stare at one another in the pale moonlight, and when I hiss disapproval at her, she disappears in a single graceful bound from the deck to the lawn below. The moon is almost full, riding high above the treetops, fast-moving clouds streaming across it like a dancer’s veils. Mercury moonlight spills down through our little clearing, illuminating the house and gardens below. The scene is hopelessly romantic, evoking memories of moonlight shining on the landscapes of poems I loved as a boy. Then I sink again into the dream world.

In the pearl gray light of predawn, I pull back the down comforter and rise reluctantly from the warm bed, leaving Sandy to sleep a while longer. I dress quickly in shiveringly cold clothes and grope my way down broad wooden steps into the garden. The overnight deer has nibbled at the late blooms of Madame Isaac Pereire, a sumptuous pink rose growing at the bottom of the steps. Her petals are scattered on damp earth like fragmentary memories of a long-ago love affair. But the deer’s damage is minimal; time is what takes the greater toll now, time and the retreat of warmth and light, for we are on the dark side of the autumnal equinox, when night and day were momentarily equal. The elements of darkness daily grow stronger against the retreating light.

I stand for a moment on the flagstone pathway that curves gently through the garden to the house. The night wind has dropped away, leaving in its wake a misty hush across the woodlands. The pungent smell of damp earth and rotting leaves is in the air. Stripped of its high summer finery, the garden is all shapes and textures now— fountains of airy grasses, the shiny ovular surfaces of clipped shrubs. Splashes of color from red crabapples and cotoneaster berries and lush pink cushions of sedum flowers. A Persian parrotia, one of the first trees to flaunt its autumn foliage, is a Joseph’s coat of mingled crimsons and purples.

I am sixty-four years old, standing in half-light on a cold stone path in a garden glistening with memories and pleasures. I laid the stones for this path several decades ago while we were creating the garden from scratch amid eleven acres of woodland on a small island off Canada’s west coast. For sure this has been a path less traveled, far removed from the frenzied energy of commerce, the jostle of attainment and achievement. I’ve remained profoundly attached to this particular place, moved by it, inspired by it for decades. It is in its way as cordial as any place on earth—blessed with a benign climate that permits us to grow much of our own food, amid a richly diverse ecosystem whose plants and animals provide an ongoing engagement, and within a community of mostly caring and creative people. No matter how alluringly other options tantalize, no matter what compelling cause may require attention, the place that I share with the woman I love, this haven of natural beauty and spiritual sustenance, remains the fundament. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was one of my early heroes, wrote in Thoughts in Solitude: When we find our vocation—thought and life are one. That’s a unity I frequently feel, although in my own case I’d add place, too—that thought and life and place are one.

The days, the seasons spin past at an accelerating rate, and I want to stop them, hold them, squeeze every last drop of satisfaction out of them. Already it’s abundantly clear to me that there will not be sufficient days ahead to accomplish all that I wish to do, or to savor fully all that might be savored. I’ve arrived, unexpectedly, at that point in life when it’s appropriate to reflect upon essential questions: Why am I here? How did I become who I am? Where am I going? Does any of this have meaning?

To address such personal matters publicly does not come easily to me, for I was raised to consider self-absorption, and certainly self-congratulation, unseemly, something done by braggarts and poseurs, people who were full of themselves. Holy Mother Church taught that pride was the deadliest of sins; humility required that we go quietly and modestly about our daily rounds, maintaining a diminished opinion of ourselves as sinners and pilgrims. Nor did respectable people air their dirty laundry in public; private business was to remain private. As the old Irish dictum had it: Whatever you say, say nothing. Behavior that has now become an accepted, indeed exalted part of the cultural landscape—the vulgar chest-thumping of new money, public disrobing by the emotionally bankrupt—was not the way of decent people. And so I proceed with my story under the keenest awareness of how slender a fault line separates candor from exhibitionism.

Intimate readings of a life may be of interest to others for various reasons. Perhaps the writer has been personally swept up in great historical events or been associated with gifted and famous persons. Or maybe the memoirist is a public personality—an actor or artist or star athlete—whose breezy reminiscences of life in the locker room or the green room are sure to captivate and possibly titillate. Perhaps religious conversion has inflamed the writer with fervent desire to spread the Word, or the great tragedy of war or pestilence has blighted the author’s life or the lives of those nearby.

My story tends more toward reflection in solitude and silence than to the clash of civilizations or the roar of the crowd. I flatter myself to think that my stony path has run through mostly holy ground, that the small signs and wonders glimpsed along the way speak more of peace than of war, more of beauty and enduring love than of those forces that seek to destroy them. It seems to me that many a life encompasses twists and turns across terrain that the traveler does not recognize or fully understand. An account such as this one—of a journey that begins and ends in wonderment—is at best a descriptive outline of certain stepping-stones across one particular bit of strange terrain. But come along with me now, if you will, for I do have a few peculiar tales to tell.

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SANCTUARY

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The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,

Know the green good,

Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood

Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace.

DYLANTHOMAS, In Country Sleep

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DURING THE EUPHORIC AND TRAGIC days immediately following the Second World War, precisely one month after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, I emerged into this world, specifically into the capable hands of a worthy English midwife. My birthplace was a century-old stone building located on a hill above Woolton Village in Merseyside, a suburb of Liverpool. The cobweb of crooked streets in which the village was enmeshed evoked a decidedly ecclesiastical tone: Saint Mary’s Crescent, Monk’s Way, Bishop’s Crescent, and Abbey Crescent. Church Road, where I was born, boasted two places of worship: a Methodist church in the village and, partway up a hill, Saint Peter’s Church of England. Our home was farther up still, at Knowle Park, a Roman Catholic convent and school for orphan girls where my father was farm bailiff. From the very beginning, everything was God. Merseyside, I later learned, was a Stone Age place, its countryside dotted with hill forts, barrows, stone circles, ancient crosses, and magical wells. Whether by accident or design, fate had dropped me into a spiritual hotbed.

Our living quarters were part of an old sandstone block building—I imagine it was the coach house of a former grand estate—that also housed the nunnery’s laundry, storage areas, and barns. One entered from the road through a Romanesque stone archway into a cobblestone courtyard. A faded photograph shows my father as a young man, my older brother, Ger, and myself at about age three standing in the courtyard posing solemnly for the camera. A flock of inquisitive ducklings is gathered at our feet. In the background a solitary turkey observes us like a suspicious old bachelor.

I retain only hazy memories of my first five years spent at Knowle Park, just a few dim glimpses, one of them around the excitement of seeing my father spearing rats with a pitchfork while a big collie barked and dashed after the scattering rodents. The chubby little fair-haired fellow in old photos doesn’t feel like me at all. I have almost no recollection of how it was to be that child— was I fretful, happy, difficult? How did I view my parents and brothers? Over half a century and many miles removed from the reality, it’s almost as though that little person was a chrysalid or larva that later metamorphosed into the being I think of as myself.

My older brother, named for Saint Gerard Majella, was nineteen months older than me, and my younger brother Brendan, named for the Irish monk and renowned navigator, was born fifteen months after me. I was never quite clear who Saint Desmond might have been and remember this causing me anxiety later on, as having a patron saint was a matter of some importance. It turns out that there seems not to have been a Saint Desmond at all, and despite a few early ventures toward sanctity, I was destined not to become the first. Besides the lack of sacred patronage, I suffered the anomaly of having vividly red hair, apparently triggered by a recessive gene that had popped up as a consequence of Danish raiders menacing the Irish coast in the dim mists of history. Our youngest brother, Vincent, was born after the family left Knowle Park.

My father was a robust little Irishman from County Down. His family had lived in Newry until his parents separated when he was fourteen, with his father going his own way and his mother taking her two daughters elsewhere. My dad was on his own, forced to make his way in life. He’d strapped a few garden tools to his bicycle and cycled off across the Irish countryside, picking up whatever small jobs he could. Eventually, like so many before him, he left Ireland for a better chance at work to be found in Liverpool.

My mother’s people were Irish too, with a splash of Spanish, although she was born and raised in Liverpool, which was where she and my father met. Her parents had not approved of my father’s courtship, apparently considering him an unreliable provider. Harsh words were exchanged, including on their wedding day, and the rift was never healed. I didn’t really know any of my grand-parents and we had only fleeting contact with various aunties, uncles, and cousins. I remember no large family gatherings convened to celebrate or to mourn. We were not a clan in any sense. The adults we saw most of were Sister Anthony, a nun from the convent who was quite devoted to us, and my mum’s friend Mrs. Richter, a portly little lady who lived down the hill from us, on the lip of Woolton quarry, from which had come the sandstone blocks that composed our house and much of the village.

One thing is certain amid the misty half-remembering of those first few years of life: that I began in a green and pleasant place of trees and fields, barnyard animals and ancient stone buildings, infused by the whispering piety of nuns. There I absorbed a sense of the sacred and of sanctuary, from the Latin sanctus, meaning sacred. In the Christian tradition a sanctuary was a holy place or piece of consecrated ground set aside for the worship of God or of one or more divinities. But it also became a place in which, by the law of the medieval church, a fugitive from justice or a debtor was immune from arrest. Thus it was a place of refuge also, a retreat both sacred and safe.

There was no question that danger lurked all about us. Hitler’s war had only just ended and Luftwaffe bombs had flattened whole sections of Liverpool. I remember the city pocked with heaps of rubble where buildings once had stood. Even with Hitler dead in his bunker, we were not safe. Across Church Road from our home the high stone walls of an abandoned estate were said to enclose neglected woodlands in whose depths tramps occasionally took shelter. Tramps were men of despicable habits and appetites, and God only knew what vile and filthy acts they’d perform on little boys who disobeyed their parents and ventured into those forbidden woods.

Gypsies sometimes lurked nearby as well, devious characters known for snatching unsuspecting children and carrying them off so they never saw their parents again. Whenever there was an encampment of Gypsies on nearby common land, I tingled with a fearful fascination over these exotic and dangerous people, their odd habits of dress, their strange horse-drawn wagons. They were everything that we were not: itinerant, disreputable, irreligious, tribal, mockingly defiant of society. The men worked as tinkers coming door to door to repair leaking pots and pans and, it was thought, to reconnoiter for what might be pilfered. When the Gypsies broke camp and left, I felt a surcease of danger and simultaneously a sadness I didn’t understand because they were gone away.

That the outer world was a breeding ground of evildoers was a conviction that I absorbed, like oxygen, from as long ago as I can remember. An instinctive distrust of strangers became second nature to me, a conviction that people at large were greedy and selfish, eager to take advantage of honest folk like ourselves. More than half a century later I’m still extricating tendrils of that foul inheritance from unexplored recesses of consciousness. I no longer blame my parents for it, for they in their turn had inherited it, the narrow, secretive, gossip-ridden character of Irish peasantry. Neither they nor I had any conception that the real foe, the saboteur of the soul, lies within each of us, and from that dark truth there is no sanctuary.

But everything has two sides, and while there might well lurk the likelihood of catastrophe beyond our little plot of holy ground, I must have intuited that there was safety and loveliness to be savored within it. The instinctive distrust of the unknown, the other, was balanced by a love of my parents and brothers and something else as well—I think an incipient love of solitude and seclusion, a delight in the natural world, in plants and creatures, extremes of weather, starry nights, and landscapes of surpassing beauty. I believe a sense of wonderment was also planted in my soul back then, an intuition of the power and beauty that trembled in everything.

BUT THIS LOVELY sense of being shielded by chant and flower was not to last, for our family was driven out of Knowle Park when I was about five years old. My father had quarreled with the mother superior of the convent. Affable and gregarious most of the time, particularly with people outside the family, my dad was not by nature a quarrelsome person. But when he thought himself ill-treated or misused in some way, he dug in and wouldn’t budge.

He lacked all skill at compromise or conciliation, and his stubborn sense of outrage at some perceived injustice—perhaps an Irishman’s legacy born of six centuries under John Bull’s boots—is one of my own more troublesome inheritances.

I don’t know what the quarrel concerned but it resulted in his losing his job and our losing our home. A disaster in the land of the landless. A horse-drawn cart pulled up in front of our dwelling one morning. My parents piled our few meager household goods onto the cart and my two brothers and I climbed on as well. Because we didn’t own a car and I’d never ridden in one, to do so would have seemed far more remarkable than was riding on a horse-drawn cart.

The horse trudged down Church Road pulling the cart. In my mind’s eye the scene is reminiscent of something out of Catherine Cookson: the honest and hard-working farm bailiff and his young family unfairly driven from their home to face a cruel world. We clopped past Saint Peter’s Church, in whose graveyard the bones of the as-yet-uncelebrated Eleanor Rigby lay, and down into the village of Woolton. The cart creaked to a halt in front of a two-story brick house, the last of a strip of dismal row houses on Allerton Road in the heart of the village. The house fronted onto the road, staring at a matching row of houses opposite. Next door to us sat the Woolton Public Baths, a squat brick building that held a little swimming pool and washing facilities for those who lacked full bathrooms at home. Across the street from the baths, on the corner of Quarry Road, the Grapes pub and hotel catered to sinners, drunks, and adulterers. A huge stone church up on High Street loomed directly behind our house. We’d moved from the shadow of a nunnery to the shadow of a Congregational church. On Sunday mornings the village resonated with the ringing of bells from its four churches.

But there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere on our street, nor any flowers. Trees could be glimpsed only in the distance. Expelled from a green and pleasant place, we’d come to a crowded neighborhood of bricks and stone. Through our small domestic drama, my family was re-enacting the industrialization of Olde England, moving from pastoral to urban life, for Woolton had already by then been swallowed up as a part of greater Liverpool.

I think a sense of my father’s failure hung in the air after our move to the village. Surely it was his stubbornness and pride that had brought us down to this. I wonder now what he felt at the time, and what my mother felt. A more melancholy character, my mother endured life’s blows with a resignation that was equal parts stoic and ironic. The exilic condition comes naturally to a certain kind of Irishman, wrote Anthony Burgess in his preface to Modern Irish Short Stories, and I suspect that my father, having experienced exile at a young age, was less fazed by our changed circumstances. No doubt anxious to prove himself a more worthy provider than my mother’s family had judged him, he got a job working on the Liverpool buses, first as conductor and later as driver, and we settled into life as village folk. (Twenty years after our expulsion from Knowle Park I would suffer an uncannily similar experience when I was ejected from the monastic life I’d chosen. Like my father, I tangled with religious authority and paid a heavy price. I think of it now as a family specialty, getting up the snoot of religious tyrants and being pitched out onto the street for our efforts.)

But our familial piety wasn’t the least bit dampened in the process and, as I reached school-going age, I became a churchgoing marvel. I can still picture myself rising every morning in a little upstairs bedroom of that row house, dressing quickly and setting out on foot down Allerton Road with my brother Ger while the village still lay hushed in the secrets of morning. Reverently we’d enter Saint Anne’s Catholic Church with our little black missals in hand for attentively following the saying of Mass. The highlight was to rise together from the pew where we knelt and make our way up the aisle to kneel at the communion rail to await the approach of the priest murmuring in Latin as he lifted from a golden chalice and placed on each of our tongues the sacred wafer, the Body of Christ. As we had fasted all night and